Do. Good Stitches Hexy Top

Remember this block? June was my month as quilter for the Love Circle of the Do. Good Stitches charity quilting bee. I asked each of the ladies to make two Hexing Around blocks for this quilt. Check out the results—even cuter than I was expecting!

I asked for bright, summery colors, and the Love Circle ladies really did it up in that department. These blocks are so fresh and fun. And even though I didn't specifically ask for blocks with fussy-cut centers, almost everybody did fussy-cut theirs, adding another whole level of coolness to this quilt top. Among the blocks, there is a duck, a fish, an octopus (squid?), a sleeping princess, a cat, a giraffe, kitchen utensils, flowers, and—appropriately, on a couple of levels—several bees. So it's almost turned into an I-spy quilt. What an unexpected bonus!

When laying out the top, I staggered the blocks—I like the honeycomb appearance that gives. Although, if I had it to do over again, I wouldn't have asked the Love Circle ladies to attach the strips to the top and bottom of the blocks. The whole point of that was to make the block square—I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me that the block doesn't need to be square. It would have been much easier (and fewer seams) for me to attach one piece of sashing between each block. Well, lesson learned.

My little assistant was concerned about the quilt flying away in the breeze

Thank you, Love Circle ladies! And FYI, there are two more hexy blocks that I'm putting on the back, so if one of your blocks appears to be missing, you'll see it on the back soon enough.

Updated to add: I'm jumping on board with the Hex-Along at Lily's Quilts! This looks like a really fun, loose, no-rules kind of quilt-along (which is the only kind I'm capable of joining at the moment). Basically, you're welcome to join with any project that includes hexagons in any form. So I'm in! Yay for dual-purpose projects!